Kouyoumdjian was awarded an OPERA America commissioning grant to create an opera adaptation of Armenian filmmaker Atom Egoyan's Adoration. Written in collaboration with librettist Royce Vavrek, Adoration touches deeply on the narrative of Kouyoumdjian's growing years. Adoration follows Simon, an orphaned high school student. As part of a dramatic writing exercise, Simon's teacher encourages him to appropriate details from a historical terrorist attack as an event perpetrated by his parents. When his story goes viral, Simon uses the hysteria within his community and on the internet to highlight the challenges of intolerance and racism in our society. The fictional and actual circumstances of the loss of Simon's family are revealed in fragments, only fitting together with a shocking final revelation about Simon's parents' deaths.
Laine Rettmer is the director of the opera and Alan Pierson is the music director. The cast includes Omar Najmi playing Simon, Miriam Khalil playing Sabine, Roy Hage playing Sami, Naomi Louisa O'Connell playing Rachel, David Adam Moore playing Tom and James Demler playing Morris.
Hate is too often portrayed as binary. We either hate or we don't. We hate someone for something they did or some perceived slight, or we hate "the other." Yet we are not born with hate -- it is learned, nurtured and developed over the course of a lifetime. Adoration tells two simultaneous stories -- a fictional story of terrorism and betrayal juxtaposed with a real story of family strife and rejection of something unfamiliar.
Described as having "the union of words and music to generate real emotion" by Classical Voice North America, Adoration was commissioned, developed and produced by Beth Morrison Projects and this presentation marks the company's 16th collaboration with LA Opera. As part of 2024/25 Off Grand productions, the performance is also supported by a consortium of generous donors to LA Opera's Contemporary Opera Initiative, chaired by Barry and Nancy Sanders.
Of the opera, Kouyoumdjian shared, "I like having time where I spiral down into this hole and explore things through music that are more difficult to talk about... I have been a really big fan of Atom Egoyan, who is a Canadian-Armenian filmmaker. If the music I write can do anything to humanize these experiences, then it is successful."
Mary Kouyoumdjian is a composer and documentarian with projects ranging from concert works to multimedia collaborations and film scores. As a first-generation Armenian-American coming from a family directly affected by the Lebanese Civil War and Armenian Genocide, she uses a sonic palette that draws on her heritage, interest in music as documentary and background in experimental composition to progressively blend the old with the new. A finalist for the 2024 Pulitzer Prize in Music, Kouyoumdjian is a strong believer in freedom of speech and the arts as an amplifier of expression. Her compositional work often integrates recorded testimonies with resilient individuals and field recordings of place to invite empathy by humanizing complex experiences around social and political conflict.
Kouyoumdjian has received commissions for such organizations as the New York Philharmonic, Kronos Quartet, Carnegie Hall, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Beth Morrison Projects/OPERA America, Alarm Will Sound, Bang on a Can, International Contemporary Ensemble, Brooklyn Youth Chorus, the American Composers Forum, Roomful of Teeth, WQXR, REDSHIFT, Experiments in Opera, Helen Simoneau Danse, the Nouveau Classical Project, Music of Remembrance, Friction Quartet, Ensemble Oktoplus and the Los Angeles New Music Ensemble among others. Her work has been performed internationally at Carnegie Hall, Lincoln Center, New York's Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), the Metropolitan Museum of Art, MASS MoCA, the Barbican Centre, Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM), Millennium Park, Benaroya Hall, Prototype Festival, the New York Philharmonic Biennial, Cabrillo Festival, Big Ears Festival, 21C Music Festival and Cal Performances. Her residencies include those with EMPAC, Buffalo String Works, Alarm Will Sound/The Mizzou International Composers Festival, Roulette/The Jerome Foundation, Montalvo Arts Center and Exploring the Metropolis. Her music has been described as "eloquently scripted" and "emotionally wracking" by The New York Times and as "politically fearless" and "the most harrowing moments on stage at any New York performance" by New York Music Daily. In her work as a composer, orchestrator and music editor for film, she has collaborated on a diverse array of motion pictures, including writing the original score for documentary An Act of Worship (Capital K Pictures and PBS's POV Docs) and orchestrating the soundtrack to The Place Beyond the Pines (Focus Features).
Upcoming projects include an album of her works with the Kronos Quartet and the West Coast premiere of her opera, Adoration, with LA Opera in 2025.
Kouyoumdjian holds a D.M.A and M.A. in composition from Columbia University, where she studied primarily with Zosha Di Castri, Georg Friedrich Haas, Fred Lerdahl and George Lewis; an M.A. in Scoring for Film & Multimedia from New York University; and a B.A. in Music Composition from the University of California, San Diego, where she studied with Chaya Czernowin, Steven Kazuo Takasugi, Anthony Davis, Steven Schick and Chinary Ung. Dedicated to new music advocacy, Kouyoumdjian is a co-founder of the annual new music conference New Music Gathering and served as the founding executive director of contemporary music ensemble Hotel Elefant and co-artistic director of Alaska's new music festival Wild Shore New Music.
As an avid educator, Kouyoumdjian is on composition faculty at the Peabody Institute at Johns Hopkins University and The New School. She has previously served on faculty at Columbia University, Boston Conservatory at Berklee, Brooklyn College's Feirstein School of Cinema, Mannes Prep and the New York Philharmonic's Very Young Composers program. Kouyoumdjian is proud to be on the board of the American Composers Forum and is published by Schott's PSNY.